What Would Levon Helm Do: A When You Awake Guest Mixtape

The title is a question and a provocation. What would Levon Helm do? What music would he have on? What would he want to hear after the show, or before it, or on the drive back from the gig?

The answer, as constructed by the person who put this mix together, is a sequence of music that carries the spirit of what Helm and The Band did: rootsy, warm, physical, rooted in American musical tradition without being confined by it.

The guest mix format

This is a guest mix, meaning it was assembled by someone other than the site and submitted with a short description of its intent. The selector's identity is not given here; the music is what matters.

The sequence runs from Americana acts who carry the country-rock tradition forward, through some of Helm's own solo material, into the artists who most directly continued what The Band started.

The Levon Helm solo career

Helm's solo work, especially the Dirt Farmer record (2007) and Electric Dirt (2009), is the most direct continuation of what he was doing with The Band. Both records were made with musicians from the Hudson Valley and surrounding area, the region where The Band settled in the late 1960s and which became Helm's home base for the rest of his life.

The Midnight Ramble concerts at his Woodstock barn, which ran from the early 2000s until shortly before his death in 2012, were the live equivalent: a barn, musicians, the music playing until it felt like it was finished.

What's in the mix

The sequence is not documented in a track-by-track format here — that would turn the mix into a playlist, which is not the same thing. The description is of a mood and a logic.

It opens in The Band's territory and moves through the artists who carry that tradition: the ones who have listened to Music from Big Pink and understood what it was asking of them. It includes some surprises, as the best mixes do.

It ends in a place that is quieter than it started. That is the right direction.

Related: The Band Goes Twang and Levon Helm Rambling on the Roots. Full Mixtapes index.